completely opposed to it, yes. im an ex refugee. i hate war and especially conscription. and super especially a pointless war that destroys the whole country and sets it back for generations to come.
ive also seen what western interefernce looks like when the west wants there to be a war. for example compare this to boris johnson torpedoing the peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022
On 18 March 1992, all three sides signed the agreement; Alija Izetbegović for the Bosniaks, Radovan Karadžić for the Bosnian Serbs and Mate Boban for the Bosnian Croats. The plan had assigned each of the 109 municipalities to be divided amongst the three ethnic sides. The allocation of the municipalities was mostly based off the results of the 1991 population census that was completed a year before the signing of the agreement. The agreement had stipulated that the Bosniak and Serb cantons would each have covered 44% of the country's territory, with the Croat canton covering the remaining 12%.[3]
On 28 March 1992, after a meeting with US ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann in Sarajevo, Izetbegović withdrew his signature and declared his opposition to any division of Bosnia. What was said and by whom remains unclear. Zimmermann denied that he told Izetbegović that if he withdrew his signature, the United States would grant recognition to Bosnia as an independent state. What is indisputable is that on the same day, Izetbegović withdrew his signature and renounced the agreement.[4][5]
Ukranians should take note that the Bosniak side came out even worse after that war, while the Serbian side today controls half of the country in a defacto almost independent state
> i hate war and especially conscription. and super especially a pointless war that destroys the whole country and sets it back for generations to come.
Good, I must assume then that you hate Putin for starting war, killing and bombing Ukrainians and surely campaign for Putin to pull back to the internationally recognized Russia borders, right?
correct but since we live on the same planet at the same time i demand for ukraine to never join nato or any other armed alliance, for ukraine to outlaw bandera nazis, for palestine and israel to be one democratic state of equal citizens regardless of ethnicity within historic palestine, for kosovo to be recognised again by the us and satelites as part of serbia (like ukraine does) etc
The "It was Boris" theory in regard to the Istanbul negotiations has been thoroughly investigated and debunked. But we know you will continue to cherish it anyway, no matter what the factual record actually says:
The Zimmerman-Izetbegović protocol is a bit murkier, and it doesn't help that the WP section you cite contains unsourced speculation. However it does seem to have been a genuine blunder from the US side.
That doesn't mean "the West wanted there to be a war", though, and I think that's a very naive and misinformed way of looking at the world. For one thing, it objectively wasn't true in that situation, as the EC and Canada, i.e. a solid majority share of "the West" were solidly behind the agreement. So right there, that perspective turns to mush.
It also essentially ignores (like most of these "torpedo" theories) the agency of local actors. And as such, it reflects an ironically imperial attitude toward the world.
The main reason the Lisbon Agreement failed was that Izetbegović was against it. So fundamentally it was his blunder to make. The US seems to have added to that blunder, most likely by not recognizing the (rather cold-blooded) intent of the Serbs to actually start a war if independence was declared and recognized.
But that doesn't mean "the US simply wants war". Rather, it's just another indication of what has been its primary character flaw for most of its existence since it became a world power: that it just assumes the rest of the world will see things the way it does, and go along with it.
Lastly (and back to cold-bloodedness), let's not forget that the failure of the Lisbon Agreement did not, by itself, cause those SDS snipers to climb to the top of the Holiday Inn in Sarajavo and start shooting into the crowd of peaceful demonstrators below on April 5th, killing 6, which was the actual kinetic trigger of the war. Or to cause the Serbian side to start engaging in massacres in outlying areas shortly thereafter.
In short - the US/West are often stupid/bad; yes. Some of its factions (like Cheney-Wolfowitz and now Trump-Musk apparently) do seem to genuinely want war. But "the West" does not, and most of the actors who manage to grab the steering wheel for long enough to have an impact plainly do not. Thinking that they do is just childish, and won't get you anywhere.
oh boy you want to sound confident but really you have no idea what you are talking about. lol at the sds snipers being cause of war. war in yugoslavia was already one year in by the time it started happening in bosnia. for objectivity reasons when talking about catalysts for the war you should also read about the wedding attack in sarajavo that happened several weeks prior to the sniper event. anyway if you are ukranian, pray that the peace agreement your country signs doesnt result in a type of governing system that bosnia has
the war in bosnia is generally thought to have started due to an illegal independence referendum held at the start of march 1992. if you are ukranian think crimea. also it wasnt a bosnian-serbian war. bosnian is not the same as bosniak. a bosnian is a person from a bosnian region (sometimes also incorrectly referring to people from herzegovina) and not a side in the conflict. you can more correctly say that the war was about bosnians killing bosnians. a bosniak is a nationality, historically slavic muslim, from the region of former yugoslavia. also it was a bosniak/croatian/serbian war, a three side war. moreover it wasnt really a Serbia vs Bosnia and Herzegovina vs Croatia war, as in state vs state, but a civil war faught by people living in bosnia and herzegovina. today bosnia and herzegovina has 3 constituent nationalities: bosniaks, croats, serbs
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This person has said that Ukraine "provoked russia into invading" by talking about joining NATO. It doesn't make sense and it's not going to make sense.
An interesting detail about language that not many people know: the "sense making" involved in language occurs within the mind of the reader, it is not contained within the language itself.
So if something doesn't make sense, it is possible (but not necessarily so) that it is a skills or ideology issue with the reader.
Note also that detecting ideological bias in oneself is a very difficult thing to do, but it seems like the opposite.
How is that not true, though? Claiming it’s Ukraines fault for the war is absurd, but joining NATO was always going to be seen as a provocative act. It’s geopolitics and there’s never black and white lines.
Obviously attempts of bullying victim to join a friend group that might protect them is provocative to the bully, as it might limit their capacity to do the bullying.
The question is, why should we avoid doing it rather than let them escalate and use this opportunity to stomp the bully. Which is in the works and will happen in few years.
Because this isn’t the school yard. And the country you label a “bully” has nukes and probably cares more about Ukraine than you do, based on willingness for sacrifices (though in reverse).
There were people talking like you among JFK’s chief of staff during the Cuban Missile crisis. Same argument. Had JFK listened to them, we very likely would not be here today.
School bully might have a gun but if he uses it then it's game over for him too. And russia behaves like a bully. Any step back emboldens them. What might have been true at the height of cold war might not be true now. Befriending the opponent failed. Now it's time to finish the job and actually win the cold war. NATO already knows this and preparations have begun. There's very little chance to avoid the direct conflict unless russia collapses harder than it did when soviet union fell. This time they won't be keeping their nukes or whatever's left of them.
If this was a computer game, I’d see it the same way.
But unlike in a computer game, in the real world, that would you have labeled your enemy, does not simply disappear. If anything, you’ll create a vacuum. And I am not sure where you are taking the confidence that who or what ever feels that vacuum will be better than the status quo. The Americans have tried that in Iraq and Syria. The Vietnam war as well. And I believe the result, in every case, has been anything but that nice clean victory that “finishing off” of your enemy in a computer game promises.
In my view, this comes down to Chesterton’s fence. Before you tear down a fence, it would be helpful to understand how it came to be erected in the first place.
Please do correct me if I’m wrong, but pretty much the only time the strategy of killing of an enemy regime worked was Hitler. That was a man who applied industrial processes to murdering humans - rail networks, assembly line processing, gas chambers. This is not the level of evil we are facing here, at all.
If Putin is anything as evil as you think he is, he will surely have systems in place that will ensure the destruction of major cities in the United States in case of anything happening to him or his regime. You schoolyard, bully, metaphor, while having the benefit of being easy to understand, carries with it a risk - 1%, 5%? - that our children will find themselves in the world of A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Leaving the defeated be turned out to be a terrible idea again and again. Fortunately we have a very good blueprint for civilising rouge states straight out of World War II (as you noticed). Basically you need to divide and control. Indefinitely. Until democratic mechanisms are developed and society gets educated. Until a new generation grows and flourishes. Basically this time russia gets Germany treatment. This will cost money but still less that leaving them be. And some of it is going to be recouped with their natural resources.
Putin is just as evil as hitler and even more stupid and inept. While the West was developing, russia deteriorated. Nuclear capacity of russia is no longer believable. Attempts at demonstrating capacity for delivering icbm payloads ended up with crater on the launch site. The best they could do was Oreshnik that they try to sell as a new weapon which it isn't. The degree they try to lean into it and present it as a credible threat clearly shows that they have nothing else at this point and very few of that. 45 nuclear threats all ignored without consequence don't look good either.
It's even debatable how much of a threat Soviet Union really was at the height of its power because myth of its power was mostly manufactured and reinforced by USA that could use it as an excuse to funnel money to military industrial complex which otherwise would be hard sell with largely isolationistic public. It could be plainly seen when Soviet Union collapsed and USA was briefly aimless until it found new enemy to blow out of proportions in the form of terrorism. It was crap so they switched quickly to China. They no longer have a need for russia so they no longer are going to be doing marketing for putin.
Bully had a gun but he kept in in damp cellar. So the time to stomp him is now, even if there's some risk remaining, before he steals some money, to buy some solvent and oil to clean the gun he thought he won't ever need to use.
Some nukes might fly, and even a few might land but it's the best time there will ever be to turn russia to ex nuclear power. History doesn't stand in place. Thousand of nukes were already detonated on Earth. Few more from russia arsenal that might still actually launch and explode will make a very small difference. And retribution for using any nukes will be more terrible than what anyone can even imagine.
Poster accepts millions of people with their skin burned off just for a couple of square km in Eastern Ukraine. At this stage I feel that Ukrainians and Russian deserve each other. Please keep it an intra-slavic conflict!
I accept everything life brings me and have very little influence over it. I am accepting this only as much as I accepted millions dying in a pandemic. The fact that one did happen and other might happen has very little meaning to me.
> Please keep it an intra-slavic conflict!
Here's that pesky isolationism that had to always be circumvented in order for USA to dominate the globe the way it did and getting rich of this the way it did.
What makes you think russia has any intention to keep the conflict intra-Slavic with constant talk about multipolar world with them in one of the leading roles? Trying to cosplay it a little bit already with BRICS? Why the biggest hit to their ambitions since 2022 was them getting pushed out of Syria? How's that intra-Slavic? Domination over their self-appointed zone of influence is just a stepping stone as it always was.
I suggest you read “The Kindly Ones” by Littell. Or, for a smaller investment of time, “Just Revenge" by Dershowitz.
Putin is not even on the same axis as Hitler in terms of evil. I can only take your words to mean that you have no idea who Hitler was - making you, ironically, much closer to a Chamberlain than a Churchill.
The idea that intelligent people like you can draw such conclusions makes me unspeakably sad.
It reminds me of a passage in Stefan Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday” in which he is shocked to see how, weeks before WWI, peasants in a French village cinema turn into a war hungry mob the moment the German Kaiser appears on the screen.
Quote:
> At the moment when Kaiser Wilhelm appeared in the picture a storm of whistling and stamping broke out entirely spontaneously in the dark hall. Everyone was shouting and whistling, men, women and children all jeering as if they had been personally insulted. For a second the kindly people of Tours, who knew nothing about the world beyond what was in their newspapers, were out of their minds. I was horrified, deeply horrified. For I felt how far the poisoning of minds must have gone, after years and years of hate propaganda, if even here in a small provincial city the guileless citizens and soldiers had been roused to fury against the Kaiser and Germany—such fury that even a brief glimpse on the screen could provoke such an outburst. It was only a second, a single second. All was forgotten once other pictures were shown. The audience laughed heartily at the comedy that now followed, slapping their knees loudly with delight. Only a second, yes, but it showed me how easy it could be to whip up bad feeling on both sides at a moment of serious crisis, in spite of all attempts to restore understanding, in spite of our own efforts.
> The entire evening was spoilt for me. I couldn’t sleep. If it had happened in Paris, it would have made me just as uneasy, but it would not have shaken me so much. However, seeing how far hatred had eaten into the kindly, simple people here in the depths of the provinces made me shudder.
So what? In a just world, there would no violence or threats whatsoever.
My point was that it was entirely predictable. If you point a gun at someone else, you are likely to get shot. Especially if they tell you repeatedly that they will shoot you if you point a gun at them.
I dont think Russia was threatened by Ukraine, but NATO and more specifically the US.
All of these analogies break down because there is no real world equivalent to a purely defense action like locking your doors.
The idea that NATO and the US especially only engage in defensive military actions is what requires an insane level of reality denial.
At any rate, Im not even trying to claim Russia has a moral high ground, just that the situation was completely predictable. At best, it was like putting your hand in a cage with the rabid dog. You can make a moral point that the dog shouldn't bite, but it is still idiotic to ignore the barking, snapping, and foaming at the mouth.
Now NATO and the US forced russia to invade a sovereign country and go to war with them, killing hundreds of thousands of people?
Also now somehow russia is not full of human people but has the intelligence of a rabid animal with a disease affecting its brain and somehow their borders were crossed with aggression?
I'm guessing there is no explanation or evidence coming for any of these claims because if you had it, you would have put it in your comment.
The analogy with the dog is that you know exactly what will happen, not the biology.
What claim do you want evidence for? That Russia was willing to invade Ukraine and kill hundreds of thousands? I think the evidence speaks for itself. They were willing to do it.
This is how I thought your reply would go unfortunately. I ask for evidence and you act like you don't even understand the concept, conveniently avoiding every absurd claim you just made.
> The idea that NATO and the US especially only engage in defensive military actions is what requires an insane level of reality denial.
Oh? I'd ask for evidence but I think you're just misunderstanding what NATO is. Just because the US is part of NATO does not mean that anything it does is automatically an action of NATO.
Believe what you want. The US global strategy and practice uses NATO bases to transfer and supply its wars, house it's nukes, and intercept retaliation.
> I dont think Russia was threatened by Ukraine, but NATO and more specifically the US.
Russia was threatened by EU actually. The initial 2013 crisis, Crimea / Donbas invasions happened as a consequence of EU association agreement which was pulling Ukraine away from Russia.
Russia isn't threatened in the sense that NATO will invade Russia proper - the nukes pretty much guarantee that can't happen. NATO / EU are "invading" what Putin considers to be Russia's sphere of influence. In case of Ukraine, Putin plans/planned to unite Russia, Ukraine and Belarus into one country - the creeping integration of Belarus serves as a template.
Well for one thing by not placing many troops or building bases despite all the ridiculous claims of NATO invasion I keep hearing about. Also there was a joint council and a treaty meant to hear Russia's complaints and to find ways to cooperate such as in terrorism. It was Russia's increasing push towards authoritarianism and imperialism which undercut relations.
What's there to be concerned about? Look at the number of NATO troops and equipment in Europe in the 1980s and 2013, look at the reduction of German tanks from 5000 to 200 and removal of all US tanks from Europe, removal of missiles, destruction of stockpiles, closure of bases, abolishment of conscription. The continuous and dramatic decline in all areas alone debunks the narrative that blames NATO. There is no way to look at the sharp decline of military might of Europe and claim any threat from it; it's just total nonsense. Until Russian invasion of Ukraine, most European countries funded their militaries far below the minimum level required to maintain existing capabilities. Europe was unilaterally disarming itself.
At the same time, since Putin came to power, Russia has been running massive army reforms and increasing the number of soldiers and equipment on European borders. With each passing day, European militaries were becoming weaker and Russian military grew stronger. Russian "security concerns" are nothing but a cover story for the eventual decision to take advantage of military balance gradually tipping in their favor.
It was extremely predictable with extreme hindsight bias only.
Most of the eastern Europe entered NATO without an incident. Baltics is closer to Russia's power centers (St. Petersburg and Moscow) than Ukraine is. Finland and Sweden entered NATO without incidents. Entering NATO was undeniably beneficial for these countries, since it has a very good safety record of protecting its members. Russia tends to invade countries which didn't yet make it to NATO.
When bush pushed to start the NATO process in 2007, the ambassador to Russia said it would lead to war and strategists agreed.
I agree NATO membership is beneficial for basically all its members. It provides a great deal of security to be under the US umbrella. NATO aspirations did not work out well for Georgia.
I dont really see what rights have to do with it. My point is that the current situation was entirely predictable, and in fact, it was widely predicted.
NATO is a defense pact. And your portrayal of NATO is ridiculous. NATO bent over backwards to satisfy Russian paranoia. NATO had barely any troops(just enough to say if you invade and kill them it's war) in the eastern NATO member countries until the full scale invasion of Ukraine.
NATO has never once been used in a defensive war, and is constantly used in wars of aggression, primarily by the US. It would be too exhausting to even type and link the various countries the US currently bombing and fighting in during 2024.
Ukraine wasn't joining NATO when Russia invaded in 2014 or 2022 when the full scale invasion happened. Ukraine wasn't even seeking NATO membership in 2014 prior to the Russian invasion. The goal of the post revolution of dignity government was stability and taking steps towards joining the EU(and even joining the EU was still seen as a difficult process that would at best take many years). Everyone including Russia knew that there was no chance of joining NATO anytime soon since France and Germany among other countries had and were still objecting. It's clear that the NATO excuse for the war is absurd bullshit
Killing half a million Ukrainians so that a country whose population is a third Russian doesn't vote for the Russian-friendly candidate over some Western-backed candidate who wants to exterminate and expel Russians,
Nowhere near a half a million have been killed.
The country identified as 17 percent Russian in the last census.
No one one from the Ukrainian side was going to, or is ever going to expel or exterminate anyone.
No one from Ukraine I talk to (including people very close to events at the time) gives any credence to the "coup" theory.
You obviously have no understanding of the Language Law, or what it actually does. And anyway it was passed in 2019 and so had nothing to do with events of 2014.
People in the West talk about the Ukraine situation all the time, from every angle, include quite obviously very pro-Russian angles. Not just online, but right there on major channels like Fox and CNN. There are no "allowed" or "disallowed" viewpoints, or any other repercussions or constraints.
Everything you're saying above is sheer lunacy, basically.
The problem is that Ukraine has been trying to join NATO since the early 2000s. The answer was always the same: "we'll consider it". This wasn't going to change in 2014, when Ukraine had no working government and Russia invaded.
It's also a nonsense argument given Putin's aggression prompted NATO's largest expansion in a decade and arguably most-significant expansion since the 1990s.
